Page 30 of Stars in Umbra
‘Stop!’ the trooper barked, in a filtered and cold intonation. ‘Hands where I can see them!’
Mo raised his palms slowly, eyes half-lidded, calculating.
Mo’s neural node parsed the man’s identity using his voice.
YatinMlitko.
Tyran’s 2IC and a formidable soldier in his own right.
His battle stats projected over Mo’s visual HUD interface, and he grinned.
‘You want my hands, Mlitko, I’ll give them to you.’
‘Hell, how do you know who I am?’ the rebel growled.
‘Tis no matter, just that I do. I’m all over your fight style, so if you want to persist with this shit show, tis your funeral.’
Mlitko blinked, shrugged, smirked in a devious incision of his mouth, and lunged, his mono-spear sweeping in a diagonal slash.
Mo ducked, somersaulted, came up on one knee, and flung two knives that appeared from nowhere, glimmering from the nanites in his armor.
One aimed at the rebel’s chest, the other at his thigh.
Both were deflected by the combat suit, skittering off with sparks.
‘Cute,’ Mlitko growled.
The mono-spear ignited, its blade screeching through the snow in a blur.
Mo’s vision narrowed. He dropped the pretense. His breath went still.
His plated garb went translucent, and his skin sigils flared, allowing his power to leak through and blind his opponent.
Mlitko hesitated. ‘Thefokk?’
Mo’s body pulsed with a radiant silver-black light, his outline blurring, stretching, flickering between dimensions.
Then he moved, faster than the eye might see.
He appeared behind Tyran’s second in charge and struck the base of his neck with a crackling palm, sending a pulse of concussive force straight through the armor.
Mlitko staggered, stumbled, but Mo was already above him, feet landing on his shoulders, twisting mid-air.
He unleashed a coiling thread of otherworldly spectral, phantasmic power that tore through the soldier’s weapon arm, ripping cables and blood in one seamless surge.
The soldier roared, his systems flaring red.
Mo landed as the snow around him lifted, swirling upward in a cyclone of kinetic pressure.
For a moment, his body flared as if he were made of starlight.
With a guttural cry, he struck the ground with both fists.
The energy erupted in a focused shockwave, sending the insurgent flying thirty feet into a ridge, his armor cracking on impact.
His life signs, displayed on Mo’s HUD, sputtered and died.
Mo blurred forward, grabbed the man’s discarded comms unit, and crushed it beneath his boot, leaving no witnesses.
